C. Vann Woodward, Historian Who Wrote Extensively About the South, Dies at 91

By RICHARD SEVERO

Published: December 19, 1999

Correction Appended

C. Vann Woodward, whose gifts of scholarship, storytelling and social conscience combined to produce some of the most readable and respected histories of the South, died on Friday at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 91 years old.

Mr. Woodward regarded himself as an old-fashioned storyteller who was as interested in the literature and culture of the South as he was in its turbulent economics and politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

He took to heart the lessons of literature. He conceded that his interest in Southern writers would lead to accusations that he was nothing more than ''a chronicler with a weakness for history-with-a-purpose and . . . the still graver charge of being a historian, dedicated to fact, who is inspired by fiction.''

He had little use for historians who produced tomes that lacked the grace he found in literature. ''History as currently written is bland, banal or philistine'' and ''often morally obtuse, ethically archaic and intellectually insipid,'' he told the American Historical Association in 1970, as he completed a term as its president.

He argued that history should not be confused with the natural sciences and was not comfortable with it being regarded as a social science. He thought of it as an art form rooted in scholarship. He saw history as a field where ''the main excitement of the adventure comes in the writing.''

''The historian-detective,'' he said, ''does not really know how it will all turn out until he reads what he has written.''

Mr. Woodward said he found much truth in Willie Stark, the central figure in Robert Penn Warren's novel ''All The King's Men,'' and he found it too in such characters from William Faulkner's fiction as Lucas Beauchamp, Sam Fathers, Joe Christmas, Dilsey, Charles Bon, Jim Bond and the Snopeses.

Mr. Woodward's most famous work, ''The Strange Career of Jim Crow'' (1955), became a best seller and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it the ''historical bible of the civil rights movement.'' Some critics regarded it as the single most influential book ever written on relations between the races in the United States. The book documented that segregation, as expressed by Jim Crow laws, did not appear until well after the end of the slavery, at the beginning of the 20th century.

Mr. Woodward also wrote a biography called ''Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel,'' which concerned itself with a man not so far removed from Willie Stark. Tom Watson, who lived from 1856 to 1922, was a Congressman from Georgia in the late 19th century and the quintessential Negrophobe, representing what Mr. Woodward called ''the most ignorant, bigoted and reactionary forces in American life.''

The book was first published in 1938, then republished in 1955. Critics credited it with dispelling some myths about the Southern populists who thrived after Reconstruction and demonstrating that the standard image of the South, as portrayed in most books -- somewhere between ''Gone With the Wind'' and the Uncle Remus stories -- was not to be taken seriously.

Another noteworthy book was ''Origins of the New South'' (1951), in which Mr. Woodward detailed the negotiations that took place been Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans after the presidential election of 1876, in which an electoral crisis occurred and Rutherford B. Hayes was eventually declared the winner. Southerners agreed to his being seated as the nation's 19th president only after he agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, where they had been since the end of the Civil War.

Although sharply critical of segregation and of the Southerners who believed in it, Mr. Woodward nevertheless loved the South and gloated in the 1960's when racial problems erupted in the North, resulting in riots and the burning of neighborhoods in certain cities. ''It was time those bastards up North had their time,'' he said.

''Probably no scholar contributed more toward the civil rights movement than he did,'' said the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William S. McFeely, who was a student of Mr. Woodward's at Yale University in the 1960's. ''Though he lived more of his life out of the South than in it, he remained Southern, and he remained loyal to the South. He always defended it; he just wanted to rid it of its worst problem, its racism.''

Sheldon Hackney, a former president of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania and another former student of Mr. Woodward's, called him ''the most admired historian of my lifetime.''

''Even more than for his mammoth contributions to understanding American race relations and the history of the South, or for his graceful prose and subtle thought, Vann Woodward will be remembered for being the model of intellectual integrity,'' Mr. Hackney said.

Comer Vann Woodward was born Nov. 13, 1908, in Vanndale, Ark., the descendant of a clan that in the years before the Civil War had been a major slave-owning family. His mother was the former Bessie Vann, whose family had come to Arkansas generations before from the Carolinas via Tennessee. They created the village of Vanndale (population 300), which contained a motley collection of Confederate veterans, former slaves, tenants, sharecroppers, a generous supply of creditors who preyed on farmers who were down on their luck, and quite a number of Negrophobes. ''The Faulknerian repertoire was all represented,'' Mr. Woodward would later recall.

His father, Hugh Alison Woodward, was a public school administrator in Arkansas who later ran a small college in Georgia. The family, according to Mr. Woodward, was of ''modest status.''

Mr. Woodward spent the first 10 years of his life in Vanndale, then moved with his family to Morrilton, about 50 miles north of Little Rock. Among his most vivid memories there were of a Ku Klux Klan gathering at the Methodist church, after which the Klansmen, in full regalia, left a donation with an obliging minister. But no less vivid was his memory of Charles Hillman Brough, a former governor of Arkansas who denounced lynchings, and of his uncle Comer McDonald Woodward, who also spoke out against racism.

Mr. Woodward went to public school in Morrilton, where he was something of an outsider. To win acceptance, he went out for the football team. He did not like the game very much but played it well.

In 1924, after his graduation from high school, he enrolled in Henderson-Brown College in Arkadelphia, Ark., a small institution run by Methodists. It was there that he suffered one of his rare intellectual defeats. He thought that he should concentrate in the laboratory sciences but he failed chemistry. He did rather well, however, in expository writing.

Within two years he tired of Arkadelphia and transferred to Emory University in Atlanta, in part because his uncle Comer Woodward had become dean of students. Emory bored him almost as much as had Henderson-Brown. He took a history course and found it so bad that he decided he would take no more history courses as an undergraduate.

He liked Atlanta, however, because it provided him with an opportunity to meet black intellectuals, among them John Hope Franklin, an educator, and J. Saunders Redding, an actor, dramatist and essayist.

By the time he received his Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1930, Mr. Woodward had become a social activist determined to reform the South. He wanted it to be understood, but mostly he wanted it to change. He began teaching freshman English at Georgia Tech and reviewing books for The Atlanta Journal.

He had seen New York City once as an undergraduate. But now he decided to go there and study. In 1931 he enrolled at Columbia University and signed up as a candidate for a master's in sociology. After what he described as ''two full and shattering days,'' he transferred to political science ''in desperation.'' He still had no degree in history.

While in New York he met Langston Hughes, whose poetry he admired, and got to know the principals of the Harlem Renaissance. At one point, he thought he might write his thesis on W. E. B. Du Bois. But according to Mr. Woodward, Mr. Du Bois heard his Southern accent and backed off.

In the early 1930's he vacationed in Europe and visited Paris, Moscow and Berlin. A Communist took him to a section of Berlin where he could see the plight of workers, Mr. Woodward recalled, and he gaped and said, ''My God, man, they've got electric lights and running water.'' They were much better off, he thought, than the sharecroppers he knew in Arkansas and Georgia.

Back in Atlanta and teaching at Georgia Tech in 1932, he involved himself in the case of Angelo Herndon, a young black Communist who was accused of inciting an insurrection. Mr. Woodward raised money for Mr. Herndon, but soon found himself without a teaching job. He long maintained that he lost his job because of a budget cut, but others saw his dismissal as punishment for his sympathy for Mr. Herndon.

Mr. Woodward earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina in 1937. Before World War II, he taught briefly at the University of Florida and the University of Virginia. During the war, he served as a lieutenant in the Navy. His war experience led to the publication of ''The Battle of Leyte Gulf'' in 1947.

From 1947 to 1961 Mr. Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University, and in 1961 he became Sterling Professor of History at Yale, a position he kept until his retirement in 1977. Over the years, he also lectured at the University of London and at Oxford University.

Among his other books was ''The Burden of Southern History'' (1960). He also edited many books, including ''Mary Chesnut's Civil War,'' which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. There were also numerous articles for the American Historical Review, Johns Hopkins magazine, the American Scholar, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.

Mr. Woodward's wife, the former Glenn Boyd MacLeod, and their son, Peter, predeceased him. No immediate family members survive.

Photo: C. Vann Woodward (Alan Zale, 1990)

Correction: December 22, 1999, Wednesday An obituary of the historian C. Vann Woodward on Sunday gave a misspelled surname in some editions for the Civil War figure whose diary formed the basis of a book he edited. It was ''Mary Chesnut's Civil War,'' not Chestnut's.